All these Darol Anger shows were pretty cool, adding an extra fiddle to Restless Wind or Smile is always fun.
Lost, Mouna Bowa, Joyful Sound, and Ms. Brown's were extremely standard; I have nothing to say about any of them. In fact, Ms. Brown's may have been below average relavant to other Ms. Brown's, but there are too many for me to keep track of them accurately. Barstool was standard too except that it's acoustic mando on this one, not that that is very uncommon anyway.
But then Darol Anger comes out and every song gets a makeover. He is pretty good at blending in with any band, very chemistrific or something. You can tell this from the outset not really from his superfluousness in MLT, but from the segue into Lonesome Road that he is a part of, a long and diverse jam that even has some cool reggae stuff?
Set 2
No matter what time of year it is, it always seems like "festival season is just about to get started." Anyway, Blackberry Blossom has an always pretty open jam that should put Darol to the test again. Having a 2 x 4 string fiddle instead of just a 4 string is nice in the composed section as well. Some cool whatever-that's-called in the jam, fiddle picking, open-faced fiddle picking, I forget, but Darol does it pretty frequently with YMSB too. Afterwards, things get pretty heavy, as they always do around this point, and it's nice. The fiddle sounds more like electric guitar at some points. This is a better Blackberry than the somewhat recent (2/00) Victor Wooten one, despite my Victor Wooten bias. I still like the 10/28/01 Blackberry the best, even though I'm not a fan of techno SCI.
Shakin' the Tree is cool. Darol doesn't add much to this one but it is well placed. No Shakin' the tree will ever meet my standards set by 11/17/00 and 11/4/00, plus the end-of-song jam on the Horning's 2001 one. Freedom Jazz Dance-- didn't see that one coming. If it were an earlier year I would assume Billy was drunk but I guess he just forgot how to talk this show.
The Round the Wheel > Jellyfish > Round the Wheel is pretty awesome, but so are most sandwiches made with Round the Wheel bread.
Nice encore. People Get Ready lends itself to Kang's voice very nicely but they never seem to get it quite right, probably cause it's played so seldom.
4 stars instead of 3 because of Darol. There are better Darol shows out there from around this time. Set 1 was overly standard, set 2 needed one more song.